"Almost all of themjumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell.

One woman, in a final act of modesty, appeared to be holding down her skirt. Others tried to make parachutes out of curtains or tablecloths, only to have them wrenched from their grip by the force of their descent.

The fall was said to take about ten seconds. It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 125mph in most cases, but if someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph.

When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated.

Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.

At the office of the New York chief medical examiner, a spokesman said this week that they did not consider these people ‘jumpers’. She insisted they fell from the 1,350ft tall, 110-floor skyscrapers, for jumping would imply suicide.

‘Jumping indicates a choice, and these people did not have that choice,’ she said. ‘That is why the deaths were ruled homicide, because the actions of other people caused them to die. The force of explosion and the fire behind them forced them out of the windows.’...

Unofficial estimates put the number of jumpers at around 200, but it is impossible to say for certain because their bodies were indistinguishable from others after the collapse of the Towers. The official account is that nearly all 2,753 victims in the Twin Towers attack officially died from ‘blunt impact’ injuries.

Ten years on, more than 1,000 have yet to be identified from remains. They were vaporised in the inferno.

After the planes hit, raging fires pushed the temperatures to 1,000c, sufficient to

weaken the skyscrapers’ steel frames.

The metal conducted the heat through the building at a terrifying speed and it reached the upper floors long before the flames did.

There were reports of people having to stand on desks because the floor became so hot.

Fire experts say people rarely throw themselves out of burning high-rises until they have exhausted every other option. Indeed, as survivors desperate for fresh, cool air crowded at the windows smashed open by the force of the planes’ impact, it is possible some of the ‘jumpers’ were actually pushed out in the crush.

The only research that comes close to being an official account is buried deep in an appendix of the huge report into why the towers collapsed, conducted by the

National Institute for Standards and Technology.

As part of its research into where the fire was at its most intense, NIST analysed camera footage and still photographs, and counted 104 jumpers, often recording the floor and exact window from which they left.

All but three leapt from the first building to be hit — the North Tower. The second plane struck the South Tower 16 minutes later but it collapsed first, giving occupants less time to react.

The first jumper is recorded plunging from the North Tower’s 149th window of the 93rd floor on the north face of the building at 8.51am, just over four minutes after it was hit by the first hijacked Boeing 757 between the 93rd and 99th floors.

At least four jumpers tried to climb to other windows for safety then lost their grip. One person climbed from the 93rd floor to the 92nd, clinging to the window’s edge before falling just one second after someone else plumetted from the same window — number 215 on the east face of the tower.

The early jumpers came from the crash zone where the plane entered the building — the

offices of the insurance brokers Marsh & McLennan.

The last jumper fell just as the North Tower collapsed 102 minutes after the building had been hit. Photographer Richard Drew says he has a picture of this person

clinging to some debris while falling.

What drove some to jump and others to remain? Those who were in the South Tower, just 120ft away, at the time — and managed to escape — had the clearest view and may provide the best insight.

Kelly Reyher watched from the South Tower’s 78th floor as people started to fall out of ‘the hole’ the aircraft had ripped in the North Tower. To him, they looked ‘completely confused’ rather than consciously deciding to end it all.

‘It looked like they were blinded by smoke and couldn’t breathe because their hands were over their faces,’ he says. ‘They would just walk to the edge where the jagged floor was and just fall out.’

Six floors below Mr Reyher, James Logozzo watched with stunned colleagues from the Morgan Stanley boardroom. He recalled that it took three or four jumpers to flash past him before he realised they were people. Then a woman fell, lying flat on her back and staring upwards. ‘The look on her face was shock. She wasn’t screaming,’ he recalled. ‘It was slow motion. After she hit the ground, there was nothing left.’

For those down below, the bodies landed with sickening, almost explosive thuds. Many said it was raining bodies.

One fireman, Danny Suhr, was killed as he made his way to the South Tower after a jumper landed on him, ‘coming out of the sky like a torpedo’ and breaking his neck. Compounding the tragedy, the priest who gave him the last rites was later killed by falling debris.

When she learnt how Danny died, his childhood sweetheart Nancy thought: how horrendous for that poor person who had to choose to jump; at least Danny did not have to make that choice. At least she had a body, for Danny’s colleagues took him to hospital after he was hit.

It was a decision that saved their lives — they would otherwise have been in the tower when it collapsed.

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman says she felt like she was intruding on a sacrament as the bodies fell. She adds: ‘They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit.’

Bill Feehan, the deputy chief of the fire department, screamed at a man filming jumpers with a video camera: ‘Don’t you have any human decency?’

Fire battalion chief Joseph Pfeifer put out a desperate plea on the North Tower’s public address system. ‘Please don’t jump. We’re coming up for you,’ he said, not realising that nobody was listening — the system had long since been destroyed.

Images of the falling bodies disturbed and appalled all who saw them. On the first anniversary of the tragedy, an exhibition showing a work called Tumbling Woman,a bronze sculpture by artist Eric Fischl, lasted just a week in New York’s Rockefeller Centre before it was closed

following protests and even bomb threats.

But one picture has become an iconic image. When a man fell at 9.41am from near the top of the North Tower, Richard Drew caught a dozen frames of his descent, including one in which he is diving vertically, arms by his sides and left leg bent at the knee. The image, all the more horrific for its desolate stillness, appeared the next day in newspapers around the world.

Dubbed the Falling Man, it prompted the media to hunt for the man’s identity. None of those who jumped from the towers has ever been officially identified and, tellingly, nobody rushed to claim Falling Man as their own....

When a 9/11 Memorial Museum opens at Ground Zero next year, it will have a small display dedicated to the jumpers, but reflecting the intense feelings of unease the subject has provoked, it will be tucked away in an alcove, on the grounds that the images are considered

too private and too distressing.

It seems a harsh fate for those agonised mortals who faced the naked terror of that ten-second plunge to certain death. For the jumpers saved lives even as they were losing theirs.

In testimony after testimony, survivors of the South Tower say they only realised they had to ignore the official safety all-clear and get out fast

"Mayor Bloomberg said, “It is my hope that the (Ground Zero) mosque will help to bring our city even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam.” He has since said that anyone opposed to this project “ought to be ashamed of themselves.” "...(parag. 8)

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George Bush even described the attackers as confused kids who wandered onto an airplane. I can't find a link for this at the moment, but I heard audio of him saying this sometime in the last year or two he was in office.

Regarding downplaying of jumpers by the establishment:

I live in Manhattan and watched tv and listened to radio constantly for the first week or more after 911. I mainly watched NY1. It's a local station I don't normally watch but assumed it would have better coverage. I never heard a word about jumpers. It's possible it was mentioned but if so it couldn't have been much. I didn't even know anyone at all had jumped until my brother mentioned it to me 2 weeks after the attack, and he lives in New Jersey. Apparently the topic was at least mentioned in some places but has been universally hushed up since. ed.